In a deeply personal essay at 3AM Magazine, Darran Anderson describes his resistance to the work of Georges Perec, and the experience of finally opening himself to it.
At the New Yorker, Katy Waldman begins a sort-of-takedown of the Irish novelist Naoise Dolan with some searching questions about self-consciousness in contemporary fiction.
With Summer bringing Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet to a close, Ben Masters takes the long view to assess the novel’s contribution to Smith’s entire oeuvre.
Amid fierce debates about cultural memorialisation on both sides of the Atlantic, Jack Solloway reviews Gabriel Josipovici’s new book-length essay, Forgetting, to locate Josipovici’s sympathies.
In the latest London Review of Books, Adam Mars-Jones embarks on an in-depth examination of the politics of Jenny Offill’s Weather and comes away suspicious, feeling that Offill doesn’t practice what she preaches.
Reviewing Nicolette Polek’s short story collection Imaginary Museums, Amelia Brown sees the book as a museum in miniature — with all the fulfillment and boredom that a visit to a museum entails.
With Grant Maierhofer’s several books now appearing in a single collected volume entitled Works, David Vichnar has gone searching for a connective thread, only to find that “thread” is the wrong metaphor.
Breaking free of the frenetic pace of criticisms on social media, Sujatha Fernandes takes her time to explain the dubious politics of Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt in the Sydney Review of Books.
Amid the backlash to Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt, and the praise for Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive, David Kurnick probes the politics and rhetoric of Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season.
In the Sydney Review of Books, James Ley reviews Lydia Davis’ Essays with an eye towards the way it mirrors, rather than breaks with, Davis’ short fictions.